Volume 37, Number 4 · March 15, 1990
England's Financial Revolution
By Lawrence Stone
The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783
by John Brewer
Knopf, 289 pp., $19.95
Fourteen years ago, Professor John Brewer published a book that destroyed the prevailing interpretation of English political culture in the eighteenth century, constructed forty years before by Sir Lewis Namier.[1] According to Namier, Hanoverian politics, at any rate in the 1760s, were largely devoid of ideology, and were confined to factional bickering over appointments and pensions among a tiny political elite of squires and noblemen.[2] To Namier the only people who mattered historically were a tight little closed world of wealthy families, and their friends and dependents. But Brewer showed conclusively that not only were there at times powerful ideological issues at stake, but also that people of the middling sort, such as merchants, tradesmen, clerks, and small freeholders, who were officially excluded from the political process, were very successful in making their voices heard.
Review, 3826 words
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